I have read an item that caught my eye. I almost never 'manage' my fighters/bombers and let the AI do it. I design a carrier with the maximum amount of fighter bays I can squeeze in it after the needed parts its got to have.

Carrier don't need to be very fast like other military ships so you don't need very much engines. You don't need extra weapons, but some point defence maybe Ion weapons should be ok. But you need a good defence and some extra fuel cells are usefull too. Maybe 2-5 Assault pods so you can capture ships/bases can be very useful too. But beware when you made BIG carriers later with 10+ Fighter bays, you won't be able to capture small ships/bases anymore. The fighter stop shooting when the ships are down, but the next salve when the shields are raised mosttimes destroy the target or damage it so badly that you scapt it afterwards anyway.

Since you don't have any extra weapons at the Carrier and the fighter got a big operations range, set the design to Evade/evade. So the ship never come close to a strong Base and the fighter do their job.

I am a fan of big as they can be Carriers. Heavy Shields, a bit of Armor, DC/Repair, Countermeasures, HyperDeny, and then all the Bays that can fit. For instance in a recent game ship size at 1100 base, my Carrier was 1649sz with 22 Bays.

At that point I was running 6 main Fleets, each had 10x Capitals, 3x Carriers, and one attached Troop Transport when being used Offensively. As well as several defense fleets that were 4x Destroyers or Cruisers, depending what era they were build in. Even running all these ships and Bases I still had 5.5MCr on hand, and a +250K cash flow even after several Financial Collapses the last time I remember looking..

Too much micro. A setting in the ship design screen would be nice. But you can t even choose that your tractor beam repels raiding pirates, instead of pulling them in, or your missile ships repelling enemy close range ships instead of pulling them in...

So dont count on it and just suppress your knowledge that you can finetune, just accept the loadout as given...